MLB HISTORY
The Carry
Baseball is the sport where weather is supposed to matter most, and the claim is usually made about the wind. This is that claim checked against — games from —, joined to what a nearby weather station actually recorded — — of them. Every table below rests on the — of those played in a fixed open-air park with a known outfield orientation, which is the only set where the wind direction means anything. Nothing here is modelled. It is counted.
Across all of it, a game finishes with two or more home runs — of the time, clears nine runs — of the time, and averages — runs. Every number below is measured against that.
The wind is a park story, not a league story
This is the finding, and it is not the one the site's live call currently makes. Averaged over the whole league, a wind blowing out is worth almost nothing. Averaged over — individual parks, it ranges from nothing at all to the largest weather effect anywhere on this site.
What the league average looks like
Pooled across every open-air park, which is exactly the averaging that hides the table above. Read it as the floor, not the answer: blowing in shows up clearly even here, and blowing out barely does.
Wind and temperature together
What this page cannot tell you
There is no market column here, and there is no honest way to add one. The Weather Penalty and The Saturday Penalty both ask whether the closing total already priced the weather, because an odds history exists for those sports. None exists openly for baseball. So everything above is weather against what happened, never weather against what was priced — a weaker claim, and one worth stating plainly rather than letting the tables imply otherwise.
Two further limits. Retractable-roof parks are left out of every table on this page, because the record says which park a game was played in but not whether the roof was open that night. And the game logs carry a day/night flag rather than a first pitch, so conditions are averaged over the conventional window for each — fine for a temperature or a prevailing wind, useless for a specific inning.
By ground. The same record, venue by venue: how often each open-air park has actually been cold, windy or wet during play. Where the games get played →
Results, parks and home runs from the Retrosheet game logs; observed weather from NOAA's Integrated Surface Database and its successor, GHCNh, with gaps filled from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet ASOS archive; all public domain. Rebuilt when Retrosheet publishes a season, which is after it ends — last —.